The Diamond of Excellence Leadership Certification

This is Luman’s 29th year of working with leaders at all levels to create realistic, passionate, smart organizations that deliver consistent results.

And in that sentence you find an encapsulation of the Diamond of Excellence. Who else is teaching leaders how to build “facing and defining reality” into its cultural DNA? Or how to go beyond motivational tricks and techniques to building a team that is truly passionate and committed? Or how to produce decisions and actions over time that are smarter than the smartest people in the room? Or – the bottom line – how to create a cultural design that yields not good performance, not high performance, but what we call pure performance?

“We wanted to get away from personality-driven, fad-of-the-day teaching that yields only short-term enthusiasm…”

From the beginning of our work, and through collaborating with tens of thousands of leaders from hundreds of organizations and dozens of industries, we purposed to create material that had as perfect a blend of effective principles and efficient practices as could be achieved. We wanted something that worked consistently with actual human beings trying to collaborate, one of the hardest things people can attempt. We wanted to offer material that could bring out the very best of human nature in a team environment. And we wanted to get away from personality-driven, fad-of-the-day teaching that yields only short-term enthusiasm that is the equivalent of cotton candy – it tastes good, but pretty soon you’re feeling empty and just a little bit queesy.

We saw the failure of so much ivory-tower, laboratory-data, case-study driven teaching. There are a lot of really smart, highly educated people populating universities and think tanks. Too many of them spend their days coming up with theories, and then seeking funding to do “studies” in which they can road-test those theories. Sometimes they see something working in practice and wonder if it will work in theory. Once in a while they land on an idea that might be helpful to actual leaders in living organizations. All too often, their notions are “so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.”

We also saw the failure of so much short-term, scheme-designed, personal-experience teaching. There are a lot of people with real-world but highly limited experience who want to tell us that they have found “the way” to success. If we will only try a program that worked for them in one company in the 1990s, we can have success just like they did. If your situation is essentially the same as theirs was, and time and context haven’t changed the landscape, it might work for you. Otherwise, good luck. In our view, personal experience can illustrate a path to success, but it can’t create that path.

So over a long period of time, we at Luman created and tested a program of cultural design, a term that almost sounds like an oxymoron, but on closer inspection is a perfect blend of “soft” and “hard.” It says that culture, a seemingly gooey and amorphous concept, can be actually and purposefully designed. There are key elements of reality-based, passionate, thinking, pure-performance organizations and teams that can be built in to create a high level of sustainable success (or left out and lead to mediocrity and maybe even disaster).

We worked very hard to condense this gamechanging material into a model that was sophisticated enough that it addressed everything important about culture, but simple enough that anyone right down to the front lines could grasp it. That model is the Diamond of Excellence. You can find out more about it elsewhere on this site, but the key to remember is that it is about facing reality, building commitment, thinking smarter collectively, and focusing everything on creating and adding value. What else is needed to produce a powerhouse culture? Nothing.

The material has been captured in 10 courses, which together make up the Diamond of Excellence Master Certificate Program. This material, which has been taught to private clients over the past several decades, is now available for the first time in an online, asynchronous format. The courses are packed with takeaways, dozens in each course, things you can do right now to build a team that’s different in kind and not just in degree. The material is informative, incisive, interesting, and inspirational. There are follow-up bookettes, which also provide a base for internal dialogue about applications and an easy way for participants to be “leaders as trainers.” In addition to everything else, the courses are fully accredited by a highly regarded business school. Anyone completing these courses is certified as a Diamond of Excellence Master.

If you have a team that you want to bring together around a dynamic, actionable program, this is exactly what you need. We have people going through these courses in an organization as a cohort. In a given month, each person takes the same course, but on a schedule that fits their other activitives and demands. At the end of the month, using the bookette as a guide, they meet with senior leadership and team sponsors to discuss learnings, takeaways and applications for their organization.

They are also using our 4 integrated assessments (on reality, passion, thinking, and performance) to flesh out specific areas of need and opportunity. These assessments can be used either as team-wide tools or as individual 360-degree evaluations (what we call Multi-Facet Insights). We know of no other program where the teaching is so deeply intertwined with the assessments.

We know that the Diamond of Excellence Master Certificate Program will change the way your team thinks about leadership and culture. How? Because it has already done that for so many leaders. If you look around out there, there’s training, and schoolwork, and action learning. And then there is the Diamond of Excellence. If your question is, “How can we do something to make us an order of magnitude better than we are as leaders?”, the Diamond of Excellence is the answer.

The few minutes you can now take to look at the details on the website may be the best minutes you spend this year. If you like what you see, contact us and ask us for a copy of the program summary. You won’t find this material in a university or a training company, but that’s okay. You’ve found it now, right here.

Note: All italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International. All rights reserved.

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About the Author

James R. (Jim) Lucas, P.E., is a recognized authority on leadership and organization development. He is a groundbreaking author, thought leader, and provocative speaker on these crucial topics.

Jim is the author of fourteen books, including 13 books on leadership and organizational development. He has written numerous curricula for business and leadership seminars, as well as many essays and articles.

Jim is an award-winning senior faculty member of the American Management Association, where he teaches its premier course, The Course for Presidents. Jim has an extensive speaking schedule in which he addresses topics from his books and research and has been interviewed frequently on radio and television. He has also served as a professor in the School of Professional Studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City.